New Poem: Reduced to Ash

I got the idea for this poem last week and started writing it at work today.  It was inspired by my mother.  She would often fall asleep with a cigarette in her hand and my dad would yell that she was going to burn the house down.  She never did.

Reduced to Ash

Slowly reducing to ash, she often held

A cigarette with the slightest tension,

The way a life is held, an extension

Of herself, a sixth finger that expelled

An endless run of smoke into the evening

Air.  Drifting off to sleep, her heavy hand

Would scorch the carpet’s tone of lightly tanned

Skin and leave smoldering holes, the yawning

Blackness before a dream in which desire

Manifests.  Her vision, a glowing coil

On which she’d rest her hand without recoil,

Would end when tracing smoke back to the fire,

She’d wake to the hiss of the hot stove still fresh

In her ears, and the smell of burning flesh.